Archive for the ‘Business’ category

News.com, presumably because of a lack of real news to copy and paste, has reduced itself to relaying a scare campaign from the dinosaur full-service air travel industry, and dressing it up as real news.

TRAVELLERS flying on budget airlines are being warned that they may end up paying more than if they’d chosen a full-service airline.

The increasing number of extra charges airlines being introduced by some airlines can easily triple the cost of a budget ticket, an analysis of the nation’s budget carriers by Flight Centre has found.

This is of course rubbish. Full-service airlines like the Qantas – the shame of Australia – pay commission to travel agents like flight centre to say things like this to customers. Presumably now they are also paying money to news.com to say the same thing.

Of course travel agents would warn against using low-cost carriers, since a large part of why LCCs are so much cheaper is that they completely cut travel agents out of the air travel industry. Airlines like Air Asia even sell their own accommodation packages with their flights, something which is rapidly in the process of sending businesses like Flight Centre bankrupt.

A NIGHTCLUB party where bikini-clad women can drink as much as they want for free has been slammed as unsafe, disgusting and demeaning.

Rape crisis counsellors and alcohol experts said the party reduced women to sexual objects and exposed them to the risk of extreme intoxication and sexual assault.

Exposing yourself to extreme intoxication is the whole point of free drinks. As for wearing a bikini exposing you to sexual assault, didn’t we try to deport some dude for saying the exact same thing a few months back?

This party will of course be banned by the fun police (ludicrously referred to in the article as “alcohol experts”).

Reviewme.com is a new site that matches bloggers with advertisers. The basic gist of the idea is that advertisers will pay you to write a review of their product or service on your own blog.

The amount paid is calculated as a function of your Technorati and Alexa rankings, as well as the estimated number of subscribers to your RSS feed. As an example, this blog received a “2 star” rating and for this review I am being paid US$30. Reviewme.com will either send the money to a Paypal account or send you a cheque.

One of the biggest advantages of this idea is that – for me at least – this will provide some sort of relief for bloggers’ block. Whenever I can’t think of anything to write about or am lacking motivation, reviewme.com can tell me what to write about and motivate me with cold, hard cash.

The signup process is ridiculously simple, all you have to do is provide your name, email address and the URL of your blog and RSS feed. Your blog’s “star rating” will be calculated from the URL you give. You can also nominate multiple blogs if you have more than one.

If you don’t already have a Paypal account, then the signup process may extend to around 10 minutes instead of the 2 minutes it took me. As soon as that is complete you can get started on your first review, which is a review of the reviewme.com site itself (which is exactly what you are reading now).

The only doubts I have about this service is whether or not I will actually be offered any further reviews after the original review of reviewme.com. Are advertisers really going to be willing to pay $50-$100 for a 200-word advertisement on a blog that, for all they know, is only read by penniless hobos at internet cafes?

Nevertheless, everyone who signs up is offered to chance to review reviewme.com itself, so at the very least you’re going to get enough for a carton of piss out of it. That’s not so bad for 10 minutes’ work.

As an extra bonus, you can now tell your parents and friends that you have a real job. What’s not to like?

Hi. ChrisV here, I’m back on the Yobbo blog team. There have been some developments in the world of online poker since Yobbo’s posts on the subject. Mega-site PokerStars issued a short statement to the effect that they’ve decided it’s just going to be business as usual for them. And Neteller have, in the words of the WSJ, vowed to stay in the US.

All this means that poker should go on more or less as normal for the next 270 days, while regulations are drawn up describing what transactions banks need to disallow. And I’m not sure what Yobbo thinks, but I really don’t think it will be a problem after that, either. Even if Neteller gets somehow shut out of the market, the amount of money at stake for PokerStars is mindblowing and I have no doubt they’ll figure out a way to get around whatever the regulations end up being.

The other thing it means, of course, is that PokerStars is shortly to become market leader in the industry by a gigantic margin. They deserve it. Their software, security, support, game choice and marketing are all first-rate. Meanwhile, while it’s been profitable for me playing at Party, I’m getting some strong schadenfreude from their demise. Their support was nothing short of horrible and they did some scummy things. Think of them as the Telstra of the online poker world.

“Ask any West Australian who gets taxis and people are not just talking about half-hour wait times anymore. People are regularly having to wait 1 1 /2 to two hours,” Mr Woods said.

Deputy chairman of Safer Northbridge Peter Palmer said three-hour wait times for some passengers in the city area were the worst on record.

Fremantle mayor Peter Tagliaferri said deregulation of the industry was the best solution. He said higher night fares would also help attract more night-shift drivers.

Everybody pretty much already knows the way to fix the taxi “problem” in Perth – deregulate the licensing system so that anyone who wants to operate a taxi can get one. The current system of setting a limit on the amount of licensed taxis only helps speculators, at the expense of every other resident of Perth.

The sad thing is that the government apparently believes it has a duty to guarantee these peoples’ investments:

WA Taxi Council chairman Kevin Foley acknowledged there were major problems at some hotspots, but said deregulation would wipe out the value of taxi licences, which cost more than $200,000. “People forget that these drivers have invested in the licences as a business, and they have mortgages to pay and children to feed,” Mr Foley said.

Planning and Infrastructure Minister Alannah MacTiernan said it was the Government’s intention to reduce the ratio, but it had to balance that against the need to protect the value of taxi plates.

Why, Alannah “Worst minister in history” MacTiernan, is there a need to protect the value of taxi plates? Do you also need to protect the value of speculative stocks if some unlucky Western Australian invests in, say, Telstra 2?

Every investment carries an element of risk. Taxi plates have been a license to print money since they were brought in, but that doesn’t mean they have to be forever, especially now when the taxi situation in Perth is becoming a ridiculous, unfunny joke.

The Western Australian government is hurting the entire state for the benefit of a few whining taxi-plate owners. Alannah McTiernan should be sacked for this comment alone, even if you ignore every other idiotic thing she has done in her awful career. This is the same woman who is spending a billion dollars building a railroad down the Kwinana freeway, partly because nobody can get a bloody taxi.